No. 4 The Youth of Today Pt. 2 - The Kids Aren’t Alright

In 1965 the Who sang the ‘The Kids are Alright’. 43 years down the line and I beg to differ with Mr. Townshend. The kids aren’t alright. They seem very wrong indeed.

After berating the youth of today (or ‘yoots’, as I believe the collective term now to be) last week, it would seem that fair lady fate was to play its often cruel hand, and Jeffman and these same said youth of today were destined to collide head on; which we did. Saturday night, in fact.

It all started out innocently enough: A few pints down the local with the lads. Now I’m not adverse to all-day sessions on a Saturday. In fact, the Saturday club used to be a weekly occurrence in these parts; but people get older, they can’t handle the pace anymore, liver failure begins to set in… you know the drill. So this week it was an evening start and everything was going dandy.

… Until one of the lads had the bright idea that we should pop down to the club where his sister was having her fifteenth birthday party – just for an hour – so that he’d at least shown his face.

Well what can go wrong? In quick, couple of pints, back to this dive of boozer we call home before anyone notices we’ve gone. So we do. Team handed in a five minute taxi drive down the road.

Now let me set the scene upon getting there. It was at the local Legion club – except this place hadn’t seen an old soldier, yet alone a lick of paint, since 1963 – and the carpark was swarming with chavs. Alarm bells had started to ring.

But words can’t really do justice to such a sight. You have to experience it first hand to really appreciate it.

Imagine this. The Legion club is a carbuncle of the highest order. A festering, unlanced boil on the neck of an acne-ridden teenager. It sits off a main road, nestled between identikit brown-brick, former council houses and an adequately sized nature reserve that’s become famous over the past few years for dogging, cottaging and the occasional shooting. A mate of mine even got kicked in the head by a horse there. The two storey British Legion resembles a fortress, jutting from the ground and adding insult to an already injured landscape like a solitary, decayed tooth in the shrivelled gape of an aged and septic crone.

Climbing the stairs to where said party was alleged to be taking place, we were greeted by a stampede of yoot coming the other way. About thirty of them, all looking to put as much distance between themselves and this place as was humanly possible in an evidently inebriated state. The party was nigh-on empty. The DJ had cut the music. And the bar had been closed. There was sick all over chairs, up the curtains, and across the floor, and it had only just turned 9 ‘o clock. The party had been going for less than an hour and a half.

That’s quite an achievement, even by the cripplingly low standards of the youth of today. Apparently the mass exodus was on account of the gaffer having called the police (or po – leece, as I think the youth now refer to them).

So unable to get a drink, we trapped down to the public bar for a ringside view of the chaos ensuing on the carpark. There were kids staggering everywhere. Some being held up by their friends, unable to walk unassisted, others crashed out on the grass, covered in sick. And then there were the more resourceful ones that had hidden bottles of vodka in the bushes beforehand, reclaiming their prizes and continuing the party in their heads. It was carnage. Like a school disco organised by Oliver Reed.

But one thing that certainly helped to make the night was a comment from one of the well-past-their-sell-by-date barmaids. After repeatedly berating anyone who would listen with a cry of “they shouldn’t have served them”, and making the beer prices up as she went along (I was charged a different price each time I went to the bar), she was kind enough to deliver this wee gem:

“They’re giving this place a bad name.”

Believe me. If Heinrich Himmler were to throw a coming home party for recently released from jail, muslim cleric Abu Qatada, and hold it at this very establishment, it couldn’t give the place a worse name than it already has. This, after all, is the sort of establishment where one wipes their feet on the way out.

Not so much spit and sawdust, just spit.

But with not a copper in sight the party was ill-advisedly resumed with the caveats that no booze would be served in the function room where it was being held and no booze would be taken in there. Of course, this only meant that the youth that had been making a break for it when we arrived were back like a shot, having replenished supplies from the local off-license and once more stashed it in the carpark. Those not so astute enough in the brain to get themselves loaded on cheap booze from an off-license less than three minutes walk away, were happily paying prices made up on the fly by the barmaid in the public bar who less than an hour ago had vehemently voiced her disgust at the staff upstairs for serving these blatant minors.

And so - to cut short what was a very long night – with the booze-free party (inside, at least) back in swing, more and more of the youth descended upon this once ‘respected establishment’, the beacon of hope in an ailing community. Phone calls were made on the obligatory mobile phones that have become permanent attachments to a youth’s ear, replacing the dummy, thumb or teet as soon as they’re old enough to sit on the toilet unaided, and once the all-clear was given it was almost like a siege. BTW, why do these white kids talk as if they’re black? Not even the black kids talk it. It’s neither big, nor clever.

If somebody had’ve told me before that night that one day, me and a few of the lads would find ourselves marshalling the door at a kids’ party, I’d have called them foolish, gullible, and obviously pointed them in the direction of this here comments and opinion blog where such daftness, and ill-informed judgement are allowed carte blanche.

And so this badly timed clash with the youth of today finished around the hour of midnight, long after the party should’ve been closed down. There were teeth, blood, and sick scattered about with careless abandonment, like decorations at a gay Christmas bash. A hand dryer had been ripped off the wall in the gents and there was assorted other damages. Outside the youth of today were gathered, fifty or more so, like a pack of wild animals, too drunk to go home and chanting Birmingham City football songs (that was just the girls). It was like something out of Braveheart. They were quickly dispersed by a carload of muscle the gaffer of the establishment had finally gotten around to phoning. I think he must’ve been an Aston Villa fan.

To top it all off, the po-leece arrived in force - two meat wagons and a few cars - 3 hours too late and left with the job of scooping up a few stragglers and scraping up the remains of those that had caught the unfortunate end of the carload of muscle.

And so we left the Legion, that throwback to another time leading the fight against modernisation by falling into ruin, and headed up town to salvage what was left of the night. Suffice to say I got drunker than Rod Stewart at a Bar Mitzvah.

I don’t recall being that bad when I was their age. There’s always been vandalism, anti-social behaviour, and all the rest, but nowadays it seems to be compulsory. We’ve raised a generation of feral children, devoid of responsibility, ambition and hope. But then again, what is there to be ambitious or hopeful for?

I’ll broach that in a future post.

In the meantime, I raise a glass to the Youth of Today, and once more despair for the future.

Sad to say, the kids aren’t alright.

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